Do You Hear Our Community?

Hello.
We request, (for a year now ...) an update about the Joysticks asignement in TSW. Do you have any progress on that AXIS binding???
And one other question, do you planned to insert the Steam Cloud for savegame?
Thx for your answers.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this. Whilst we do have external controller support on our wishlist, we don't have any information to share with you on when it will become available. When we have news to share on this, we'll make sure everyone knows.

It's been many months since release, and we have seen no progress on the following features and issues:
1. As above, controller axis support
2. TrackIR support
3. VR Support
4. Performance fixes (in my case Nvidia GTX1080 cards)

To be honest, it's been really disappointing. At first I was keen to buy all DLC, but now for most non-UK routes I am reluctant to invest in them, certainly without waiting for a sale.

If DTG want to make this game a worthy successor to TS 2019, I think the priorities need to be changed a little. Maybe thats not the ambition and it's just about making cash in the short term.

Ya think? If you pay their team, I'm sure they'll gladly work on all your bugs and wishes. I do hope you have a big stack of money laying around. Do you?
Also, you do realize that the people who make the routes, don't deal with things like key-mapping, TrackIR, or any of those things? It's not like there's 50 people all working on everything, stuff gets divided into teams.

To be honest, it's been really disappointing. At first I was keen to buy all DLC, but now for most non-UK routes I am reluctant to invest in them, certainly without waiting for a sale.

If DTG want to make this game a worthy successor to TS 2019, I think the priorities need to be changed a little. Maybe thats not the ambition and it's just about making cash in the short term.

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I think if you're still even considering buying every single DLC out there, even though you want to wait for a sale for some, that DTG has made a very successful game, that you enjoy quite a bit.
Of course DTG wants to make cash in the short term, they just had a LONG time where they had a team spending all their time on a game that wasn't making any money, since it wasn't finished / released yet. Yes, every developer has this issue, but (AFAIK), DTG isn't a huge company, and TSW was quite a big project for them. Of course they want to make some money now to fill up their reserves. And not just that, they also want to make their game attractive to as many people as possible. The only way to do that is to make sure that everybody has a route available they enjoy. If all routes were UK or US for example, I wouldn't have even bought the game.

So instead of blindly accusing a company of simply wanting to milk the game as much as possible, realize these things:

The team that creates new DLC is not the team that handles bug fixes and other technical stuff.

More diverse DLC means more players, more players means more money, more money means more staff or more investments, and that in the end results in a better game.

DTG should focus ALL of it’s efforts on releasing mod tools and an SDK for third-party modders (free SDK download), so third party developers/modders can start creating game mods and third-party modders can start adding new locomotives and adding new additional routes and new content.

DTG is too small of a company to create new routes and new locomotives and DTG should focus its efforts on releasing developer tools and focus on bug fixes on the game engine and releasing developer tools for third party modders so that the community can start creating content for TSW!

DTG has around 120 employees (source their own website) plus they also contract other companies to help them produce content. TSW is their main focus (TS1 is a legacy product with little new DTG content and there’s one fishing game that isn’t that big).

This oft heard comment about they’re not a very big company - how many people do you think they need to support and build content for TSW?

Have you looked at how big some of the third party companies are that successfully produce TS1 content...

DTG should focus ALL of it’s efforts on releasing mod tools and an SDK for third-party modders (free SDK download), so third party developers/modders can start creating game mods and third-party modders can start adding new locomotives and adding new additional routes and new content.

DTG is too small of a company to create new routes and new locomotives and DTG should focus its efforts on releasing developer tools and focus on bug fixes on the game engine and releasing developer tools for third party modders so that the community can start creating content for TSW!

is NOT correct. We are currently waiting on DTG making release of a BETA test of the editor. Before they finally release the production version of the editor we’ll need to go through the test cycle and then have DTG make any revisions that are found necessary from issues detected.

Presuming that a Beta version is going to be good enough to start work on big projects or that there won’t be constraints within the Beta is a pretty optimistic view. After all DTG haven’t told us much about the logistics and constraints of the test yet.

If the Beta was made available today it’s probably a minimum of 3 months before the final version was released and that would need a very clean test.

The Beta is intended as nothing more than a test vehicle. Nothing wrong in that, it’s a very useful step along the way, but mixing the test and the release of the editor as the same thing isn’t wise.

is NOT correct. We are currently waiting on DTG making release of a BETA test of the editor. Before they finally release the production version of the editor we’ll need to go through the test cycle and then have DTG make any revisions that are found necessary from issues detected.

Presuming that a Beta version is going to be good enough to start work on big projects or that there won’t be constraints within the Beta is a pretty optimistic view. After all DTG haven’t told us much about the logistics and constraints of the test yet.

If the Beta was made available today it’s probably a minimum of 3 months before the final version was released and that would need a very clean test.

The Beta is intended as nothing more than a test vehicle. Nothing wrong in that, it’s a very useful step along the way, but mixing the test and the release of the editor as the same thing isn’t wise.

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It’s possible that DTG could be letting third parties test it now. I don’t know for sure, but its possible.

Anthony Pecoraro I think that DTG said themselves that they were including some third parties in their pre Beta testing that was meant to start before ‘Xmas.

The input of the third parties doesn’t change the Beta test/Production timeline. It could be helping the quality of the Beta release but then again issues that they may be discovering may explain the further delay.

Third parties starting real work using the editor before the user Beta test is completed would be a risk, but if they believed that it was unlikely to need significant changes might be one they might take.

It's been many months since release, and we have seen no progress on the following features and issues:
1. As above, controller axis support
2. TrackIR support
3. VR Support
4. Performance fixes (in my case Nvidia GTX1080 cards)

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Frankly you can forget about VR for several years IMO. It's too niche and too expensive for all except a very noisy minority to be honest. Controller axis support including Raildriver and TrackIR support are far more important and both of those trail behind stuff as the editor and PIS not to mention further optimisation. I haven't noticed many people moaning about Nvidia 1080 issues so I wonder if that's more unique to your system rather than TSW.

‘The team that creates new DLC is not the team that handles bug fixes’

Do you have proof of that? In my experience it would be unusual, at least for bugs in recently introduced software for the original coder not to play at least some part in the bug resolution

‘I’m sure they’ll gladly work on all of your bugs..hope you have a big stack of money’

Here I’m confused. Why does jon.silk have to fund the rectification of bugs in a software product he has bought. Is this common? Is the missing element in getting DTG to address bugs (or perhaps making the editor available) that we as a community need to start crowd funding for DTG?

‘The only way to do this is to make sure that everyone has a route available that they enjoy’

Not only is that not the ‘only way’ it’s probably commercial suicide for DTG. DTG will be most successful by balancing the amount of DLC that they invest in compared with the number of sales they have. What DTG need is blockbuster titles. Titles with low sales that appeal to a small niche (within what is already a small niche hobby) is exactly what they need to avoid.

‘DTG isn’t a huge company, and TSW was quite a big project for them’

I’m not sure what your point is but if it’s to elicit sympathy for DTG it doesn’t work, at least for me. DTG started TSW because they thought they could make money from it. They had the background (with the TS1 franchise) so they certainly should have had a better idea of what was involved than just about anyone else. If it isn’t going as well as they’d hoped, that is their problem and not one that gives them a bye from not dealing with issues like bugs. Also, there more than a few who wondered if DTG had lost their collective marbles when they embarked on new Flight, Train and Fishing franchises at the same time. If they’re struggling with resources they might want to go back and review that strategic decision.

‘Don’t deal with issues like key mapping, TrackIR, or any of those things’

The big picture I’ll suggest you’re missing is that the video game world is evolving very quickly. The things you’re discussing aren’t bleeding edge. If DTG isn’t putting resources into supporting those sort of technologies are they looking at the stuff coming along that will really threaten them? While Train Simulation may not be the best example video games players tend to be younger and want to use new technologies. If they want to grow the franchise (or even keep it healthy) DTG are going to need to consider how to adapt the game. Ultimately, you can have a huge library of DLC routes but if the game looks ‘old’ it is not going to attract new players.

You seem to be assuming that everyone who works for DTG is a developer.

Those 120 people include managerial and finance staff, HR, marketing and PR, licensing and legal, IT maintenance and web developers...
Fewer than 30 people actually work on developing TSW.

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Sounds like that's DTG's problem. If you've got fewer than 1/4 of the people in the company actually producing any product, you're going to be struggling financially.

Having worked for small companies, the ratio has always been around 8:1 production to support. With a team of 30 developers (project managers, researchers, artists, programmers, world builders, QA) you should have at most five people in supporting roles. Things like licensing/legal, IT, finance etc can be done by people outside the company on an ad hoc basis; It's just not efficient to have multiple people within a small company employed in those roles when most of the day to day aspects of them could be completed by a single competent adminstrator.

If a support team of 90+ people is in place and each DLC is turning a profit, then sufficient additional people should be hired to produce enough DLC to saturate the market. DTG either need to release the tools or saturate the market themselves to maximise profit. As things stand, drip feeding DLC's to a hungry market whilst having fewer than 1/4 of the people in the company actually making DLC is madness.

‘You seem to be assuming that everyone who works for DTG is a developer’

However, where’s your source on ‘less than 30 people actually work on developing TSW’.

Who, and when if you claim Discord or some other forum as your source.

I’ll take @Digital Draftsman’s excellent post one step further. If you’re right that less than 25% of the staff at DTG are working on TSW (and there are I believe generally three projects active) then they are doomed. You can’t compete in today’s gaming or software market with one in four being revenue generators. I’m not sure you could in the past either.

Two things that might make your numbers true (although still misleading). My bet is that DTG outsources quite a bit of work to low cost countries (those trees you are enjoying in the Pennines might well have been planted in India). So there might be thirty people in the DTG offices but a larger number of people working on the effort.

What your numbers, if correct, might be showing is that DTG really isn’t a development entity anymore but a publisher of other houses software. There are some clear signs of that in TS1 with every new DLC release coming from outside providors. Therefore you’ve ninety people working on marketing, checking revenues on Steam etc., plus of course the Fishing franchise. Even that sounds wrong.

Bottom line if you’re right and only 25% of the resources are going into development - in a software development company - with a relatively NEW company bad things are going to happen. The cost structure is going to drag it under.

‘You seem to be assuming that everyone who works for DTG is a developer’

However, where’s your source on ‘less than 30 people actually work on developing TSW’.

Who, and when if you claim Discord or some other forum as your source.

I’ll take @Digital Draftsman’s excellent post one step further. If you’re right that less than 25% of the staff at DTG are working on TSW (and there are I believe generally three projects active) then they are doomed. You can’t compete in today’s gaming or software market with one in four being revenue generators. I’m not sure you could in the past either.

Two things that might make your numbers true (although still misleading). My bet is that DTG outsources quite a bit of work to low cost countries (those trees you are enjoying in the Pennines might well have been planted in India). So there might be thirty people in the DTG offices but a larger number of people working on the effort.

What your numbers, if correct, might be showing is that DTG really isn’t a development entity anymore but a publisher of other houses software. There are some clear signs of that in TS1 with every new DLC release coming from outside providors. Therefore you’ve ninety people working on marketing, checking revenues on Steam etc., plus of course the Fishing franchise. Even that sounds wrong.

Bottom line if you’re right and only 25% of the resources are going into development - in a software development company - with a relatively NEW company bad things are going to happen. The cost structure is going to drag it under.

Anthony Pecoraro wonderful. If that’s the correct number of developers vs. staff. (and no work is contracted out) time to buy Trainz the next time it’s on sale because DTG doesn’t have much of a future.

And when we talk about how big companies are and what they can achieve with small development staff I’ve just bought X-Plane11 and excellent it is too. Compare the reviews on Steam for the game vs. TSW and TS1. It also seems to have a great community - although I agree there are things they are ‘waiting for’.

Laminar Research who develop the X-Plane franchise are shown as having between 11-50 employees.

So the next time someone feels the need to play the ‘small company’ card for DTG maybe they might want to download the trial version of XP11 and ask how Laminar do it?

wow - you literally have 0 class. you're aware youre almost universally hated right? have you ever wondered why the only posts on the forum come from new members or yourself? take a look in a mirror, the day you get banned is the day these forums refresh and become active again.

take a look into ANY other community - youre know, youre hated, youre not respected.

Might I suggest that an ex member of the DTG staff (and as he’s pointed out) identifying himself as such might be expected to not poke at other members? Hardly very professional and there’s probably paperwork that he signed that suggests he shouldn’t. So he can poke at me, but not me at him? Could he have found a larger picture? Double standard MarkusLiberty . Are you pushing to ban killakanzGaming? And as for NAYDOG (the one with the ‘hard’ avatar, but no doubt a heart of gold) telling someone that they are ‘universally hated’, that meets forum standards as well? Might we have a little clique here?

Clearly having been at DTG recently he’s ITK but you’ll find that he’ll only provide information that he considers harmless. He knows why there’s no editor yet, but he’s not going to share that is he?

So you want me banned. I, along with a few others do attempt to insert a little reality into this forum. Often it’s not popular, but it’s useful that someone points out that content proposals of 500 mile routes and ten locos aren’t realistic. It helps that someone reminds people that it isn’t the editor that’s coming soon (if it does) it’s a Beta test that’s promised. It helps to challenge assertions and ‘facts’ that people spill out with little evidence. I’m sure you see the flaws as well MarkusLiberty but it’s easier to let others do it isn’t it? Suggest that there seems to be further delays in the editor, that’ll get you a few downvotes from those who seem to believe that the obvious is dangerous.

But perhaps you’d rather have a forum where everything is wonderful, and what isn’t will be fixed tomorrow? Where there can be endless and often repetitive content proposals that we all know are never going to happen. A forum where killakanzGaming can be a ‘special’ person because he worked at DTG for a few short months. And you can all sit around and laugh, just like you did in the classroom, when he makes fun of someone who didn’t know he was ‘special’.

@NAYDOG’s view is that when I stop posting the whole forum will come alive. Like most of @NAYDOG’s post it’s a little thin on the basis for the argument but I’ll happily stop posting if that’s what’s stopping others.

I look forward to reading the new exciting and vibrant community that NAYDOG has promised us.

So you want me banned. I, along with a few others do attempt to insert a little reality into this forum. Often it’s not popular, but it’s useful that someone points out that content proposals of 500 mile routes and ten locos aren’t realistic. It helps that someone reminds people that it isn’t the editor that’s coming soon (if it does) it’s a Beta test that’s promised. It helps to challenge assertions and ‘facts’ that people spill out with little evidence. I’m sure you see the flaws as well MarkusLiberty but it’s easier to let others do it isn’t it? Suggest that there seems to be further delays in the editor, that’ll get you a few downvotes from those who seem to believe that the obvious is dangerous.

But perhaps you’d rather have a forum where everything is wonderful, and what isn’t will be fixed tomorrow? Where there can be endless and often repetitive content proposals that we all know are never going to happen. A forum where killakanzGaming can be a ‘special’ person because he worked at DTG for a few short months. And you can all sit around and laugh, just like you did in the classroom, when he makes fun of someone who didn’t know he was ‘special’.

@NAYDOG’s view is that when I stop posting the whole forum will come alive. Like most of @NAYDOG’s post it’s a little thin on the basis for the argument but I’ll happily stop posting if that’s what’s stopping others.

I look forward to reading the new exciting and vibrant community that NAYDOG has promised us.

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I agree though, there is basically nothing of any value being posted here anymore whatsoever.

The state of this forum is brought up frequently in other communities, and people tend to complain about the same thing.

This isn’t going to get any better unless the moderators take action against the atmosphere that’s developed here over the past year. Third parties and othe influential members aren’t bothering with it anymore

The state of this forum is brought up frequently in other communities, and people tend to complain about the same thing.

This isn’t going to get any better unless the moderators take action against the atmosphere that’s developed here over the past year. Third parties and othe influential members aren’t bothering with it anymore

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The atmosphere is a direct result of the way DTG have been behaving. DTG rarely communicate anything noteworthy via this forum, there's very little content posted here by them, despite it being their forum. DTG are more active on unofficial channels such as the Discord server, which discourages people from contributing here, as the real conversation is apparently happening elsewhere. People frequently post lists of bugs and DTG either don't respond, or they just say "submit a support ticket", people also request all sorts of features they'd like and DTG rarely respond. To top it off, TSW and its DLC is often full of bugs and missing features, so it isn't suprising that a lot of the posts here (and on Steam) are customers complaining about the product.

There's clearly a pattern. It's the same on every train simming forum regarding TSW. So it's not the members that are responsible for the atmosphere, it's DTG. DTG have already tried deleting negative threads created by customers with legitimate gripes, and what happened? Those customers left this forum disgusted with how they were treated. If DTG were to start banning customers with legitimate complaints about DTG and TSW, this forum wouldn't have any posts at all.

DTG need to up their game with bug fixes and bring in missing features for past DLC, communicate better with their customers, and focus on implementing feedback into their future releases.

Ok everyone, I think we can all agree that this conversation went too far away from the original topic.

As I said in my initial post, we do not have any information about the progress of development of support for said devices. It is certainly on our wishlist, but there are no details we could give right now.

The last thing I want here is for people to get personal, so in order to prevent that I will start giving out warnings if similar conduct appears in other threads. I will only close this thread for now, but you've got my warning. I am all for a lively discussion and don't mind people expressing contradictory opinions, but very often all I am seeing here are baseless assumptions about the ways DTG works, and then more assumptions based on those assumptions, all with a hint of trolling, which makes me question the maturity of some users as well as their real intentions. Some of these assumptions are just mind-boggling and have nothing to do with reality, and I believe that the ways this company operates should not be a significant topic of discussion in this forum.

Everyone here wants to see DTG focusing on something particular, such as new content, trackIR support, VR support, joystick support, bug fixes (which are constantly being worked on). If we did all these things at the same time, we would never get things done. The process of development of content for TSW is always a priority and said content has to be of the highest quality, which always takes time. I cannot see most people having any problems with this besides some individuals.

If you know how to run things better - feel free to join us by submitting an application form for one of the roles and going through the interview process, but before that, I highly suggest that you think twice before posting, especially considering that I will not spare warnings.